


tomorrow they shoot me

by hegelsholiday



Category: Infinite (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Artists, Art History, Artist Woohyun, M/M, Museums, attempted museum robbery, minor magical realism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-17
Updated: 2019-09-17
Packaged: 2020-10-20 09:36:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20673212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hegelsholiday/pseuds/hegelsholiday
Summary: Woohyun searches for meaning and finds it in unexpected places.





	tomorrow they shoot me

The painting Woohyun’s stopped in front of is of moderate size, a dark stormy blue in the background. The woman and man are caught mid-kiss, their faces covered in some sort of thick white curtain. It’s oddly ghostlike; the thinness of the sheets wraps tight around their eyes and spirals down to their neck. 

The label titles it “the Lovers,” by Rene Magritte. He leans forwards, eyes tracing the way the woman mouths at her partner. He wonders why they could be called lovers if they cannot even see each other. 

“We’re closing the museum soon,” a voice behind him calls. Woohyun shakes himself out of his thoughts, suddenly aware of his fingertips skirting dangerously towards the unprotected canvas. 

“Oh,” he says, “can I have another moment?” 

The man behind him’s footsteps are brisk, impatiently loud against the tile. “You have five minutes before I lock the doors.” 

Woohyun sighs, tearing himself away from the canvas in front of him to gather his sketchbook and pencil. 

“See you?” he calls to the narrow-eyed man as he heads down the stairs into the main lobby. 

“We open an hour earlier tomorrow,” the other says, sealing off the hallway behind him. 

“Okay then,” he says. 

\---  
Woohyun squints haphazardly at the name card on the left of the work, more interested in puzzling out the exact color pallette Tanguy had applied. His pencil scrawls out a few lines on the blank page, before Woohyun sighs and gives up. 

He’s too tired for this. He’d spent a good portion of the previous night in front of a canvas, obsessively working at it in the hopes that he’d be able to finish it before the idea slipped from his mind altogether. At last Woohyun sits down on one of the benches in the center of the room, stretching himself out painfully on the wooden back. 

Surrounded by the surrealists’ work; Magritte’s green not quite tree-birds and Tanguy’s sharp strokes and Dali’s blurred, melting dreams hemming him in, Woohyun thinks he should be more scared than he is when he falls asleep with his head on his sketchbook. 

Woohyun dreams of Dali’s elephants crushing him with their thin spider-legs, over and over and over. 

“Put your hands above your head,” is the first thing Woohyun hears when he wakes up. He starts, and the sound of his sketchbook landing on the floor is far too loud. The half-registered shout is coming from a room on his left, the closest to the lobby. 

Woohyun breathes a little through his mouth, slackening the grip on his pencil he’d maintained through sleep. Every step of his shoes against the polished tile is way too loud as he finds his way through to the contemporary art exhibits. 

The man who showed him out a few nights ago has his hands slowly, watching the gun pointing at him with a careful sort of blankness. He’s wearing a security guard’s uniform today, although his shirt is half untucked and the walkie talkie is lying discarded several feet away from him. 

“Put the gun down first,” he says calmly. 

The robber scoffs, aiming the barrel of the gun directly at the other man’s forehead. “Don’t give me orders.” 

“You could damage a number of works if you fire a gun in this room,” the security guard says carefully. “I’ll give you whatever money you want, but I’d prefer if you didn’t damage anything permanently.” 

He catches Woohyun’s eye as he slips further into the room, darting a quick glare at him. Telling him to leave. If only Woohyun could. 

“There’s only one thing that might end up permanently damaged here,” the robber says. “Maybe your blood will make a nice addition to the canvas behind you. Certainly could use more color.” 

“Not much of a fan of Pollock, are you?” the security guy asks. His arms are trembling slightly as he watches the other man carefully, but his voice is steady. Woohyun thinks he must be doing more of the same, inching his way slowly across the room. 

He’s almost there when the guy being held at gunpoint drops something--small. The robber curses, cocking the gun and something in Woohyun panics, he can’t quite let that happen, every fiber of his being is screaming that he _can’t_\--

He dives, half tackling the man on the floor and knocking the gun away. The security guard moves, grabbing for the gun and aiming a vicious kick at the robber’s head. To Woohyun’s surprise, the man whose hands are scrabbling at his throat goes limp and stops moving. Huh. 

“Are you okay?” Woohyun says. He hadn’t heard the gun go off, but he could’ve sworn that the robber had squeezed the trigger. 

The security guard holds the gun up the light, tugging at the trigger with his finger. “It’s not loaded.” 

“Really?” he asks, incredulous. 

“Yeah,” the other says. “Funny that. This son of a bitch can’t even rob a museum properly.” 

“That seems like such a terrible idea,” Woohyun says. He glances down, the small discarded figures on the floor catching his eye. “You must’ve dropped these.” He picks them up, handing them back to the security guard. 

“Thanks,” the other man says, “for these, and helping deal with this.” He kicks at the unconscious robber idly. “I’m Sunggyu, by the way.” 

“I’m Woohyun.” 

Sunggyu looks at his watch. “Well, Woohyun, we’re now almost an hour past closing.” 

Woohyun frowns. “I must’ve fallen asleep for much longer than I thought—”

“I saw you,” Sunggyu says. “You looked tired, so I didn’t wake you up.” 

He sighs. “I was supposed to finish my museum perusing earlier today so I could go back to my studio and do productive work.” 

Sunggyu raises an eyebrow. “You don’t consider your time spent here very productive?” 

“Well,” Woohyun starts, before he looks up and realizes Sunggyu is not actually offended. “It’s more like I spend too much time admiring the genius of others and realizing how inadequate I am.” He winces. That’s not how he meant for that to come out. 

To his surprise, Sunggyu only snorts. “To be fair, half of those geniuses were also crazy fuckers. It could be worse.” 

“It could be,” he says, “but that’s a stereotype for artists.” 

Sunggyu hums, glancing down at his watch again. “Tell you what, I’ll go call the police to take care of the mess here, and you can have another hour or so to wander around.” 

“Wait actually--” Woohyun beams wildly at him. It’s a bit late even for him, but the prospect of spending longer at the museum suddenly isn’t such a bad idea. (The other option is, of course, to return to his dull two-room apartment studio where the light flickers out sometimes and the only things he has for company are the canvases upon canvases of failed work.) He spares a glance at the still unconscious man on the floor, before picking his way back towards the Surrealism exhibits he’d left his sketchbook in.

He’s circling around looking for the piece he’d been looking yesterday when Sunggyu walks back in, looking slightly irritated. His shirt’s tucked back in now, but he hasn’t replaced his walkie-talkie. Woohyun isn’t going to admit he’s a little lost as to where it is--the circles of the museum seem designed for him to get lost finding his way through. 

“I’m just looking for--Magritte,” he says at Sunggyu’s questioning look. “The Lovers, I think it was?” 

“Magritte’s here.” Sunggyu’s entire face softens when he smiles. He gestures towards a branch off the hallway that Woohyun could’ve sworn he’d passed already. “We just had a new collection of his work shipped over.”

“Can I--?” 

“Yeah, I wouldn’t be telling you if I wasn’t going to let you see it.” Sunggyu rolls his eyes. “So you’ve seen Lovers then? What do you think of it?” 

“It baffles me,” Woohyun admits. He looks at the painting in front of him, staring at the stormy grey of the hoods. His hand wants to stray across the canvas, skim over lines and faces that are there but not there. He looks at the man’s face first, notes how the light falls across the front of his face. Then at the woman’s face in shadow. “I can’t decide if it’s simply an unconventional depiction of a couple or something more sinister, hinting at some sort of deception that prevents them from fully coming into contact maybe?” He wonders if the two of them have ever seen each other. He wonders if it matters to them. “What do you think?” 

“Well,” Sunggyu says, “do you want my professional opinion or my personal opinion?” 

“Your personal one.” 

“I don’t think Magritte chooses to idealize love at all.” Sunggyu pauses, fidgeting with his hands as he tries to organize his thoughts. It’s a gesture Woohyun finds ridiculously endearing. “Or at least, the focus here seems to create a bleaker environment. The drapery over their eyes implies a sort of barrier to their closeness. Almost as if he’s saying that there’s always secrets that they’re going to keep between each other. They’re never going to truly be able to see, until they remove that drapery. At times you wonder if they even know it exists. If anything beyond their current narrow vision of the world exists.” 

“You’ve certainly put a lot of thought into this,” Woohyun says. He sketches a few lines in his sketchbook, thinking to himself. 

“I have nothing else to do but think about these paintings.” Sunggyu sounds a little bitter. Woohyun wonders what for; it’s clear that he cares about the art far more than the typical person would. They wander the rest of the Magritte paintings in silence, until Woohyun pauses at the one displayed front and center on the left wall. The elegant curve of the pipe fills the otherwise mostly blank canvas, brown and worn. Woohyun squints at the French below it. _Ceci n’est pas une pipe_. The display card next to it is blank, so Woohyun turns to Sunggyu. 

“What’s that one?” 

“The Treachery of Images.” Sunggyu snorts quietly. “It’s a funny little painting.” 

“Oh,” he says. “Oh, I see. The use of the word treachery though…” He looks closer at the looping French script. “Are images really _treacherous_? If we know that they are images, then they cannot really be counted on as deceptive, in that sense, right?” 

“People often accept the images they find over reality,” Sunggyu says. “The human psyche is built to filter out the world through its own selfish wants and desires.” Woohyun thinks that’s not quite right, but the silence that lapses between them feels too comfortable to disturb. 

They reach the end of the exhibit, and Woohyun really hates to say goodbye now, but the tiredness is starting to dig sharply at his temples. And he hasn’t eaten dinner yet. “You know, I’d better--” 

“Yeah.” Sunggyu frowns sharply as he looks at his watch. He really does do that a lot. “It’s a little late for you to be here.” 

But Woohyun’s a little selfish perhaps, so when he sees the small gift shop on the right side of the lobby he hadn’t noticed before, he drags Sunggyu over to it. He still doesn’t quite want to leave. “I didn’t notice this here,” he says. Something on the shelves catches his eyes, and he picks up the figurine, turning it over in his hands. It’s a small caricature of the Lovers. It’s not quite right--the woman’s head is tilted downwards, and the color of her dress is a garish pink. 

“Would you like one?” Sunggyu asks him. Woohyun pauses, hands moving over the roughness of their features carefully, as if it were the real thing. 

Woohyun stares deeply into the blankness of the woman’s eyes, completely obscured by blue-white cloth. “Yeah, sure.” Sunggyu smiles at him, his eyes curving softly. He takes the figurine from Woohyun’s hands and bunches it up in a paper bag. 

“Don’t bother with paying,” Sunggyu says. Woohyun’s a little too tired to insist, and a little too lost in the unexpected warmth in Sunggyu’s smile. 

Woohyun thanks Sunggyu. He tries to say something else, staring down at the figurines instead. They’ve reached the entrance now, but Woohyun’s doing his best to pretend not to have noticed. 

Sunggyu clears his throat meaningfully. “Well, I’ll be going,” he says. “Drop by again soon, I’ll let you into the private Dali collections if you promise not to tell.” 

“Alright,” Woohyun laughs, risking a wink. Sunggyu pats his shoulder and waves, heading off in the opposite direction. 

As Woohyun walks back to his studio, his smile starts to fade. The building’s predictably dark, the shutters all closed, when he unlocks the door. Nothing like bright rows of fluorescent lights. A small paper moth flits by, greeting him with a gentle brush of its wings. Woohyun laughs a little, thinking he’ll have to redo the lines around its wings before it gets too faded. 

The half-finished painting of a group of moths flitting around a lamppost is still drying on its easel when he slips into his bedroom. 

He places the two figurines, the two blind, befuddled lovers, on his bedside table and goes to sleep. 

\---  
“The Face of War,” Woohyun reads. The gaping shriveled heads stare back at him, tormenting him, mocking him. The skin is a baked deep brown that makes him shudder. 

“Fascinating, isn’t it?” Sunggyu murmurs behind him. His fingers dig softly into Woohyun’s shoulders. “One has to truly admire Dali’s mind.” 

“His dreams must be filled with such strange things,” Woohyun says. He traces the lines of the face in the air again, the cracked branches of the trees and the harshness of the contrast of background colors. The wrinkles on the misshapen head draw him in, some strange mix of horrible fascination that makes him shudder. “I’m not quite sure how much I like it,” he confesses. “But I suppose the point of the painting _is_ that it’s grotesque and misformed.” 

Sunggyu hums quietly. “Dreams are always manifestations of the subconscious. I think everyone must have these dreams; it’s to Dali’s credit that he can see and remember them with his waking eyes.” 

Woohyun frowns. “Then what makes him different? What makes him capable of seeing?” 

Sunggyu smiles idly at him. “What do you think about Dali?” he asks instead. 

Woohyun thinks for a moment about melting clocks and crawling ants. The face of war. “I don’t think Dali lives quite like the rest of us.” 

“Oh?” 

“His works certainly have that touch of ingenuity to them, but you get the feeling that when you start seeing the world like that, in spirals and spindly elephants, you can’t quite go back.” 

“And is that a bad thing?” Sunggyu is watching him intently, his hands folded behind his back as he leans forward, as if Woohyun’s sharing some sort of great secret. It flatters him. Woohyun basks in it, pausing for a moment. 

“I don’t know,” he says truthfully. 

Sunggyu gives him another quick smile. “We have ten minutes till closing. You should start on your way out.” 

“Aren’t you going to show me the way?” he asks. 

Sunggyu rolls his eyes. “You know the way, follow the exit signs. Even you can read.”

Woohyun fakes a grimace of mock-hurt. “Your museum is too large and too difficult to navigate. The least you could do is show me through. Maybe put in a word to your superiors to put better signs up.” 

“That’s not under my jurisdiction at all,” Sunggyu says. He sounds a little bitter at that. 

“What is?” Woohyun says. “Besides showing strangers around the galleries?” He’s never really thought about what exactly it is that Sunggyu _does_ around here. It hadn’t seemed to matter, whether he was a security guard or a cashier or a tour guide. 

“Are you calling yourself a stranger?” They’re walking down an empty hallway of hanging lights, tangled bulbs criss-crossing across beams and rafters. Any other time Woohyun would’ve stopped to look at them more closely, but now he just moves closer to Sunggyu and tentatively slips his hand in his. Sunggyu doesn’t say anything or pull away, and Woohyun counts that as a good sign. 

He grins, feeling it stretch involuntarily wide across his face. “No, not at all. Unless you take others on a private tour of Dali?” 

“I don’t know,” Sunggyu says blandly. “There was someone who toured Man Ray with me the other day--” 

“Alright, alright,” Woohyun grumbles, trying not to let the reminder that Sunggyu talked about art like this with other people bother him. All of their discussions feel strangely intimate, like there’s a part of Sunggyu that Woohyun is getting, unfiltered, unadulterated, when he talks about the pieces. “Man Ray isn’t exactly Dali anyway.” 

Sunggyu snorts. “Don’t be too flattered.” 

“I’m really not,” he says. Sunggyu raises an eyebrow. 

“We’re here,” he says, when they reach the gentle fluorescent lights of the lobby. Woohyun fidgets around with the elegant potted plants at the entrance, accidentally tearing at the leaves under his hands. 

“Are you doing anything after this?” Woohyun asks. 

Sunggyu visibly hesitates. “I have to close shop,” he says slowly. 

“I can wait,” Woohyun says hastily. “I--we could go to my studio, if you want. I wanted to show you--some of my work.” 

“You shouldn’t,” Sunggyu says, so quiet that Woohyun almost thinks he’s imagined it. 

“I want to,” he says. “I--I want a professional eye to evaluate my work. And well, if you think it’s good, I suppose. There’s no point in trying to sell art that nobody’s willing to buy in the first place.” 

“Not today.” Woohyun doesn’t give himself the time to feel disappointed. “But don’t sell yourself short. People often lack the good taste to appreciate art.” 

A horde of moths greet him when Woohyun walks through the door that night. He shoos at them half-heartedly, hands scrambling for the sketchbook he’d left on the kitchen table this morning. It’d seemed pointless to pretend that he was going to the museum just to sketch ideas out. 

Now, he thinks of different forms. Jagged ones. Half-formed. (He thinks of Sunggyu’s smile, the curve of his pale neck. The slow, thoughtful manner he used when talking about Dali.) By the time his pencil stops moving, his eyelids are sore and heavy and barely even allow him the opportunity to put his sketchbook away. 

\---  
“What’s your most expensive piece here?” the man barks. The gun’s pointed straight at Sunggyu, whose hands are slowly, deliberately raised above his head. Woohyun almost thinks he’s fallen asleep on one of the benches again. The ache in his back certainly doesn’t disprove that particular thought. 

“You’re in the wrong wing for that,” Sunggyu says, before Woohyun tackles the man from behind and there’s the sound of the gun firing and his warning shout for Sunggyu barely seems to get out in time. 

The bullet misses this time, striking clean through the display card tacked up beside the Lovers, and Woohyun sags down, fingers slackening around the stolen gun. Sunggyu barely seems to be breathing, his eyes darting from the unharmed painting to the unconscious man on the ground to the gun still clutched loosely in Woohyun’s hand. 

“That-“ 

“What the hell,” Woohyun says first. “Do you often get attempted robberies here?” 

Sunggyu shrugs. Woohyun really hates when he does that. It makes him feel small, like Sunggyu doesn’t feel it necessary to pay attention to what he’s saying. “It’s a large, fancy building in the middle of a pretty quiet part of town. Of course people might think it’s an easy target.” 

“Still,” Woohyun says shakily, “you should invest in security guards, or something. One day the bullet may not miss.” 

Sunggyu doesn’t look at him, merely brushes past him towards the lobby where the telephone is. “That’s not under my jurisdiction.” 

Later when the police have come and taken the would-be robber away, Woohyun looks over at Sunggyu’s stonily quiet face, wondering what he’d said wrong. 

“Do you want to go get a drink or something?” he asks tentatively. 

Sunggyu raises an eyebrow. “Is there something to be celebrated?” And before Woohyun can open his mouth to try and save face, Sunggyu’s already pulling him along. “Well, come on then.” 

The walk out of the museum and one of the nearest bars is hazy--Sunggyu points out a few bright city lights attractions to fill the silences between conversations. The nightlife here is stilted, passing by sporadically in hurried steps, woman in brightly colored dresses hurrying on to the next, bigger, brighter part of town. Woohyun’s a bit too absorbed in the softness of Sunggyu’s hand, the lightness of his laugh, how different, less harsh the angles of his face seem outside of the yellow wash of the museum lights. 

He laughs, pitched with slight giggles that betray how much he must’ve drank that night. “You’re weirdly funny, you know? I wouldn’t have expected that.” 

“Thanks, I guess,” Sunggyu shrugs. His cheeks are a little too red and he’s started resting his head against his hand.

“I--” Woohyun lowers his voice, setting his glass down. “I really like you, you know.” 

“That’s flattering,” Sunggyu says, smiling amiably at him. “I like you too, but you could do a lot better.” 

“I’m an artist, Sunggyu,” Woohyun snorts. “A poor one at that.” 

“So? People like poor artists with tragic stories. What do you think happened with Van Gogh? He cut off his ear and people thought he was crazy, and now half a decade later we uphold the Starry Night as a masterpiece of modern art.” 

“So you’re saying I just need to cut off my ear?’ 

Sunggyu frowns at him, squinting blearily through alcohol-fogged eyes. “Don’t. You’d look uglier with an asymmetrical face.” 

“Hey, nobody gave you the right to call me ugly.”

“All I’m saying is that I’m not advocating for facial disfigurement. Especially not for you. That would just be kind of a waste you know?” Sunggyu chooses this time to roll his head back, staring at the ceiling as if it had been painted over by Michelangelo himself. 

Woohyun laughs a little more and drinks a lot more, and when he wakes up with a sickly dry feeling in the back of his throat, he doesn’t quite remember how he got back to his apartment. 

The easel in his studio room is already set up when he goes to search for his sketchbook. There’s a half-finished portrait of Sunggyu mid-laughter, rendered in thick and brown and yellow brushstrokes that don’t do the older any sort of justice. The background is a thick red mess of clouds and layers of orange paint that Woohyun isn’t quite sure is supposed to represent, and the oil smears onto his hands when he goes to tap on it. 

Funny that, he doesn’t quite remember painting any of this. 

\---  
Woohyun’s dreams these days are feverish and muddled, a blur of lines and colors. He paints obsessively now, outside of the museum, and the moths are joined by a deliberately half-shapen cat that hurts Woohyun to look at, and he’s pretty sure he’s found stray strands of silver hair from an attempt to paint the old woman next door. 

Maybe it’s the absinthe. He should stop drinking so much, but these days the sticky scent of alcohol fogs his thoughts over and guides his brush far too much than is probably safe. He thinks of what Sunggyu would think of him, if he saw him dancing around his studio with a half-empty glass, dancing in the arms of a green fairy only he could see. 

When it’s not the absinthe, it’s Sunggyu. Woohyun has stopped lying to himself about it all. It’s not about Dali or Magritte or Picasso that keeps him coming back. He wonders if he should be concerned about when that had happened. 

Half of the museum is dark when Woohyun walks down the bend in the street. He checks his watch. _Ten minutes before closing_, Sunggyu’s voice says in his head. He smiles, before pushing the revolving doors open. 

Sunggyu is behind the help desk, sorting the coins in the cashier register and cursing softly under his breath when Woohyun walks in. 

“Oh, it’s you,” he says. 

“You don’t sound very excited to see me.” Sunggyu looks up, the quarters in his clenched hands clicking idly. 

“Look, I don’t think you should come here tomorrow,” he says. The look in his eyes is serious, heavy in a way that makes Woohyun nervous. 

“Why?” 

“They’re going to be closing this place down soon.” 

“That’s awful,” Woohyun says. He thinks about not being able to wander with Sunggyu down the endless hallways of jagged abstractions of modern art and finds that he can’t. “I know how much you love working with the pieces here--” 

Sunggyu sighs. “It can’t be helped, really.” 

“Is there anything you can do?” _Is there anything I can do?_

“No, Woohyun,” Sunggyu gives him a tight-lipped smile. “The collection wasn’t ever meant to really be open to the public anyway.” 

“So they’re just closing everything down now? Whoever owns this is just going to take all this amazing work and hoard it all away?” 

“They’re auctioning it off.” If anything, Sunggyu looks even more pained now. “Selling the older works is incredibly lucrative.” 

Woohyun frowns. “What about you then? Will you be able to find another post?” 

“Possibly. Certainly not here. Nobody really wants to hire me, you know?” 

“Why not? Is this why you said we shouldn’t see each other again?” 

Sunggyu sighs, “you don’t get it.” 

“Yeah, because you’re not telling me anything.” 

Something on Sunggyu’s face shifts. “Come on then,” he says abruptly, grabbing Woohyun’s arm and tugging him towards the hallways on the right. 

The glass cases here are filled with Greco-Roman sculptures, varying shades of earth-stained white that Sunggyu passes without a glance. Woohyun has never wandered too extensively in this part of the museum before, but now their blank glassy eyes observe him as he tries to keep up with Sunggyu. He feels like he’s being judged. He feels like he’s been found wanting. 

“Sunggyu, wait--” he says, hurrying to catch up and ignoring the way the eyes of the bust of Athena on his right follow him out of the room. “Where are we going in such a hurry?” 

Sunggyu’s head jerks backwards, the only indication that he’s heard Woohyun. He pulls Woohyun into a smaller, adjacent room, with a flight of stairs leading down into the basement of the building. “I have to show you something.” 

“But why are we--” 

“Here.” Sunggyu stops, flipping on the lights in the room. They’re bright and glaring, reverberating off the blank white walls with a kind of harshness that makes Woohyun wince. Paintings line the sides, propped up carelessly. Some are torn, others are faded, the paint eaten away by time and the poor care of its collectors. Sunggyu points him towards one in the corner, the tall wooden frame sagging slightly in the corner. 

“I don’t understand,” Woohyun says. He stares more closely at the painting in front of him, looks at the way the man in the painting stares off to the side, the fall of his hair, the curve of his eyes, focused intently on something beyond the edges of the canvas. Looks back at the man standing next to him, examining the portrait with the reassured sort of fascination of someone who’s seen something many times already. Seen the same face in the mirror everyday. The corner of the canvas is ripped but the date on the label dates it back to the 19th century. “Sunggyu--” 

“I think you do understand,” Sunggyu says, looking at Woohyun with something akin to laughter in his voice. “I think you understand better than anyone.” Sunggyu shifts the portrait--the portrait of him around with his foot, with a careless disregard that Woohyun has never seen Sunggyu apply to a work of art. “You’ve spent too long here.” 

“Sunggyu,” Woohyun tries again. He thinks about blind lovers with their heads covered in drapery. The sharp lines of illusion. “Are you—” he searches for the words, “are you—are you real? Is this real?” 

“Is Magritte’s pipe real?” Sunggyu asks. It’s pitched like a genuine question, like the conversations they’d had about Lovers and elephants and shriveled faces. “_Ceci n’est pas une pipe_. Is that real?” Sunggyu’s accented French is eerily smooth, and the way he takes pleasure in mangling the vowels that used to be endearing now unsettles him. 

“The treachery of images,” Woohyun mutters. “Isn’t all art an image, then? Is all art not to be trusted?” 

Sunggyu smiles. It’s not the kind of smile that stretches his eyes and lightens his face. It’s the cold _we close in ten minutes_ smile, the archaic Greek statue kind where only the corners of the lips are upturned to create the illusion of smiling. 

“I’m exactly as real as you think I am, Woohyun.”

**Author's Note:**

> i’m too tired to do any real editing with this, sorry. i just really really love rene magritte if you couldn’t tell. 
> 
> anyway, thanks for reading!


End file.
